Don’t Mess with your Blog Writing Success

It’s always upsetting to us when we hear a company is planning to take down either a blog post or their entire blog. While it’s troubling, there is also good learning in tracking the effects of messing with your blog writing success.

Whether you have a new product update and want to delete old posts about previous versions or maybe you have a new marketing team who wants to “shake things up”, messing with the success of your existing content is a bad idea.

Reasons companies delete blog posts or their entire blog:

A new person in the company decides they don’t like the tone of voice

A product update makes some older blog posts out of date

The company makes a directional change

They just get crabby

When working with key phrases, it’s not a “one and done” deal. It’s a constant process in which you are writing a lot; writing very carefully; and writing in a way that ensures search engines believe that you are relevant to a certain topic. This takes time, energy, and ongoing commitment.

After all that blood, sweat, tears (and probably some carpal tunnel syndrome), that page 1 ranking is something to value and treasure. You worked hard for it and you should own it.

If you’re ranked highly on key phrases, chances are your blog is a major reason why.

The Statistics

We looked deep into the Google Analytics of 2 companies who either killed blog posts or…gulp…took down their blog completely.

Company X completed ripped down their entire blog. The chart below represents website traffic on just one key phrase. They tanked the exact week they completely deleted their blog. While this chart shows traffic on only 1 key phrase, we had them ranked on over 40 high-value phrases after writing the blog for 2 years. In medical terms, the chart below is “flat-lined.” The patient is dead.

Company Y had budget cuts and had to stop making blog posts. Keeping their existing blog posts live on their website helped them maintain some rankings. There was slippage because they stopped adding fresh content using their key phrases (Google values freshness), but it was nowhere near as catastrophic as Company X.

Alternatives to ripping down posts or your blog

If your old posts aren’t relevant for some reason – Consider posting an update at the top of older blogs. Maybe put a link there to more recent posts about the new product or service

If a new person comes into your company and wants to change everything – Tell them it’s not worth killing your high results on the key phrases you’ve worked hard to get ranked.

If there’s a directional change or someone gets crabby – See the point above.

Blog writing isn’t easy. Being relevant again and again is enough of a challenge, but doing so using valuable key phrases is truly admirable. If your blog writer can do both and has earned your company a page 1 ranking on several key phrases, then listen to the title of this post: Don’t Mess With Success. You worked hard for those page 1-ers and deserve to keep them and the traffic they bring in.

ION LEAP RADIO

We’ve got statistics on companies who either stopped writing or...gulp...completely deleted their entire blog. If you’ve got older blog posts that are no longer relevant, or are just plain wrong, don’t delete them. Just edit them and point a link at a new one that’s more current. If you delete it, you’re trashing valuable key phrase ranking. More >>